[Illustration: AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD.]
[Illustration: AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD.]
Taine, who preferred Macaulay to Carlyle, might also prefer Addison to Emerson; but it is not likely that a future Grimm or another Sainte-Beuve would do so. In his "Essays in Criticism," Matthew Arnold enters a general complaint against English prose writers for a lack of mental flexibility, and against Addison particularly for the commonplaceness of his ideas. He was a severe and exacting critic.
DAVID A. WASSON.
Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whittier were all nearly of the same age, and formed a literary galaxy such as has been rare enough in any country or period of history. They are distinguished, however, by one peculiarity—a slight sentimentalism which belonged to the time in which they grew up, and is most strongly marked in Longfellow and least so in Hawthorne. Fifteen or twenty years later there appeared, as usually happens, a number of talented imitators or admirers, and with them two men of equal genius who may be looked upon as the corrective and antidote for their predecessors. These were James Russell Lowell and David Atwood Wasson.
They were as different as Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Lowell was a fine poet, a humorist and man of the world. He wrote easily and lived easily. He was the companion of wealthy and distinguished men. He acquired prosperity, as it were, by natural inclination. Next to the King of Prussia he was the most fortunate man of his time. He knew something of sorrow, but of hardship and misfortune only by hearsay. He was the child of summer, and revelled in it; but this continual happiness brought with it certain limitations. Though he was a veracious man, he was rarely a serious one. He never became thoroughly in earnest until he was stimulated by partisan feeling. His best poems were inspired by the anti-slavery conflict, and the rendition of Mason and Slidell; and it was just on these occasions that his humor was most brilliant and pleasant flavored. His productiveness was not great, and his other writings do not make a strong impression. It is said that he often tried to write a book, but was never able to concentrate himself on one subject for a sufficient length of time. He is easily the first of American humorists. The greatest compliment ever paid Thoreau was that such a man as Lowell could not understand him.
Wasson must have been born under the constellation of the Little Bear. As the Germans say, his life was always winter. Every possible obstacle was placed in his way, and misfortune came to him at one time or another in almost every shape. The difficulties he encountered in life were too great for him, and prevented the full fruition of his genius. The wonder is that they did not crush him altogether. He never acquired the sufficient public influence nor received the recognition his merit deserved. He was by nature a thinker—a seeker after truth. There was no problem,—social, political or philosophical,—which he was not ready to grapple with. He could plunge into these subjects like a pearl-diver who means to touch bottom, and would never come out till his last breath was spent. This mental habit and his continual suffering made him only too serious, too much in earnest. Jests were not in his line, but he sometimes wrote poetry of the very highest order. He is the first and most original of American thinkers.
What these two dissimilar men had in common was good Anglo-Saxon manliness—which is after all the foundation of common-sense. They wished to live as other men had lived before them, and not in any new, unusual, or eccentric manner. They believed that virtue was to be found in the great world rather than out of it; among human habitations, and in dealing with all kinds of people rather than by an isolated life at Brook Farm or in Walden Woods. They sought not after any rare and Utopian excellencies, but contented themselves with a plain, sensible, every-day morality. They were neither vegetarians, teetotalers, non-resistants, nor socialists. They considered it no sin to love a woman or to fight a man. They may be called anti-sentimentalists.
Neither were they blind followers of custom and tradition. They wished to be in the vanguard of civilization, and they were conscious that to do this they must not only accept the results of others, but add something of their own. They endeavored to become acquainted with the best that was thought and known in their time, both in literature and in other matters. They thus became excellent critics, as well as versatile and many-sided men. They were among the most cultivated men of the century, and are the most cosmopolitan of American writers. That they should not have possessed greater influence was largely owing to the tendencies of their time. The current of the age was too strong for them, and in their later years they both expressed gloomy forebodings of the future, both for their own country and the rest of the civilized world.
Wasson went to Concord in 1859 intending to make it his permanent abode, but the offer of a philanthropic gentleman who wished to take him into his own house for a year and care for him, as Mr. Badams of Manchester entertained Carlyle, induced him to emigrate again. He continued however in friendly communication with the literary people there, often visited them, and now lies buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery, so that he deserves to be classed among them, rather than with any other group of literary men.